Thursday, September 14, 2006

So I need some advice and I know that those who read this are full of advice.

I have a substantial number of cooking magazines. About half of them are the amazing and free Food and Drink (from the LCBO - even if you don't partake in alcohol, go in and grab one). The other half are Gourmet. There are some other smatterings of Cooks Illustrated, Savour, and Bon Appetit. I have some Fine Cooking mags but they are too nice to chop up.

Unfortunately the magazines are mostly ads and articles that, while interesting, aren't worth keeping. I want to just keep the recipes; with the vain hope of making a majority of them (probably not going to happen, but I want to keep then anyways).

So I got this idea from my wonderful sister - just cut out the recipes and stick them in a binder. A very good idea - I can probably reduce the whole lot to a single (large) binder.

But there is the question of how to do it en masse? I don't really want to tear them out - that can be messy. Below are a couple of options I've considered - both of them involve removing the spine of the magazine and then picking out the pages with recipes:

1. Find a willing friend with a table saw and saw off the spines. This is probably the quickest, but I am a little afraid that it won't be good for the saw and/or the magazine sheets.

2. Find an old, heavy-duty paper cutter, guillotine style. Then I would slice off the spine with either my brute strength, or hook up a pulley or hydraulic jack system to do the dirty work. But I don't know if I can go through 75+ pages with a paper cutter...

So - I'm calling on you guys to help with this question - how can I transfer my cookbooks to binders? Any one who has a good suggestion that gets used will get a free dinner - they can even chose the recipe from the binder!

3 comments:

I've got a plethora of useless ideas, some of which include fire, some of which utilize mental abilities humans won't obtain for another millennium or so. But here are a couple achievable options:

1) Invite carpal tunnel syndrome to be your friend and type them all out.

2) I have a sharp metal ruler, that when placed appropriately across a magazine page can be extremely helpful when ripping out pages. It helps get that clean edge if you have the knack. Of course text near the spine can go missing depending on the thickness of the ruler.

I'm moving into the electronic realm and toying with using my Epicurious.com recipe box. I've been typing in various other recipes that I use frequently, so I can access it at work. Why at work, you ask? Shopping! I can hit the grocery store on my way home and actually have a plan for dinner that night.

Of course, I could put a whole week of menus together, but somehow never have the time to do that.

I had a binder of recipes in plastic sleeves, but I am running out of room in my kitchen cupboard for the binders and cookbooks.